Musical Biographies : The Music of Memory in Post-1945 German Literature

Since the second half of the twentieth century various routes, including history and literature, are offered in dealing with the catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust. Historiographies and novels are of course written with words; how can they bear witness to and reverberate with traumatic experience that escapes or resists language? In search for an alternative mode of expression and representation, this volume focuses on postwar German and Austrian writers who made use of music in their exploration of the National Socialist past. Their works invoke, however, new questions: What happens when we cross the line between narration and documentation, and between memory and a musical piece? How does identification and fascination affect our reading of the text? What kind of ethical issues do these testimonies raise? As this volume shows, reading these musical biographies is both troubling and compelling since they ‘fail’ to come to terms with the past. In playing the haunting music that does not let us put the matter to rest, they call into question not only the exclusion of personal stories by official narratives, but also challenge writers’ and readers’ most intimate perspectives on an unmasterable past.

The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that showcase significant scholarly work at the various intersections that currently motivate interdisciplinary inquiry in German cultural studies. Topics span German-speaking lands and cultures from the 18th to the 21st century, with a special focus on demonstrating how various disciplines and new theoretical and methodological paradigms work across disciplinary boundaries to create knowledge and add to critical understanding in German studies. The series editor is a renowned professor of German studies in the United States who penned one of the foundational texts for understanding what interdisciplinary German cultural studies can be. All works are peer-reviewed and in English. Three new titles will be published annually.

About the series editor:

Irene Kacandes is the Dartmouth Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She received three degrees from Harvard University and also studied at the Free University of Berlin and Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece. She publishes on a wide range of interdisciplinary topics including secondary orality, rhetoric, aesthetics, trauma, witnessing, family and generational memory, experimental life writing, Holocaust testimony, and narrative theory. She has lectured widely in the United States and Europe and currently serves as President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Vice President of the German Studies Association.

Contents Overture. German Catastrophe and the Rebirth of Musical Biography 1. Thomas Mann: Dissonance as a Mode of Documentation Musicology as Narration or Mann and the Composers Mann Writes on “Wagner’s Reading of Beethoven” Mann Rewrites “Adorno’s Reading of Schoenberg” Word/Music: Speech Disruptions and Atonality Form: The Novel as “Constructive Music” Interlude I. Siegfried: Atonality and Decentralized Narrative 2. Günter Grass: Rhythms of a Fictitious Testimony Allegories of Memory: Carnival and Ethics The Aesthetics of Dissonance Music as Parody: Jazz and Onion Interlude II. Clown: Ironic Tune between Memory and Oblivion 3. Ingeborg Bachmann: The Resonance of Trauma Story and Score: Bachmann’s Musical Biography Manners of Death: Account of a Never-Ending War From the Motet to Atonal Melodrama When Music Interferes with Language Interlude III. Pianist: Austria from a Musician’s Perspective 4. Thomas Bernhard: Writing, Playing, and the Compulsion to Repeat Variations on the Compulsion to Repeat A Composer’s Life Story, the Return of the Repressed Canon, Politics and Counter-Biography Un-Musical Mother Tongue, Jargon and Dissonance Cadence Interlude IV. Composer: Sound Transfiguration after Reunification Coda. The End of Musical Biography? Bibliography Index Overture : German catastrophe and the rebirth of musical biography -- Thomas Mann : dissonance as a mode of documentation -- Interlude I. Siegfried : atonality and decentralized narrative -- Gèunter Grass : rhythms of a fictitious testimony -- Interlude II. Clown : ironic tune between memory and oblivion -- Ingeborg Bachmann : the resonance of trauma -- Interlude III. Pianist : Austria from a musician's perspective -- Thomas Bernhard : writing, playing, and the compulsion to repeat -- Interlude IV. Composer : sound transfiguration after reunification -- Coda : the end of musical biography? "Musical Biographies examines that which bypasses verbal signification and is therefore absent from collective memory. More specifically, it looks at German and Austrian writers, who turned to music in order to develop appropriate modes to respond to the catastrophe of World War II. The book contributes to a new understanding of this past and demonstrates the complexities inherent in any attempt to understand traumatic experience."-- Provided by publisher